When Caroline Morahan saw the forget-me-nots in her garden in Glasnevin last Thursday night, she took it as a sign that it was perhaps time to talk publicly about her late brother. I had asked the RTE television star a few hours earlier over tea in the Shelbourne hotel if she would consider doing an interview about James.

I had heard his tragic but extraordinary story several times over the years: he died of organ failure in 1988, a brave little boy of six whose story captured the nation's imagination 20 years ago.

Caroline said immediately that she couldn't possibly talk about it; it was too personal. I offered her reassurances that I would treat the story with the respect and integrity it deserved. Finally, leaving the hotel after our chat, she said she would talk to her parents.

When Caroline arrived home, the family had a meeting. Caroline actually became physically ill. She threw up.

The following morning, I texted her reiterating my promise that the interview would be treated with absolute sensitivity. At lunchtime she talked to her parents again and realising that it was Organ Donor Week, Caroline, perhaps peeking outside at the forget-me-nots in her garden, decided it was time to talk about James Morahan.

So, last Saturday at 4.30pm, there we were sitting on a bench in the Botanic Gardens in Glasnevin doing just that.

Caroline, wrapped up in a scarf and winter jacket over grey leggings and Ugg boots, points out the squirrel scurrying into the bush in the middle distance. Her mind is doubtless drawn to her little brother who used to occasionally play just where the squirrel is playing now.

James Anthony Francis David (the latter being his Confirmation name) Morahan was born on July 24, 1982, with polycystic kidneys.

The sandy haired cherub of Glasnevin lived a very short life. He packed, however, a lot into it -- "for all of us and for himself", Caroline smiles forlornly. "He was great fun. I'd say, if he'd lived, he would have been an outrageous troublemaker." She adds that her family had always known, as the doctors knew, that James wasn't expected to live at all. This was because, instead of having two normal, functioning kidneys, Caroline explains, "there was really nothing there for James". His condition, she says, propelled her parents Tina and Jim into having to do something about it.

The situation in Ireland then was completely different to what it is now. There is, she says, now a fantastic renal unit in Beaumont, adding that one has also opened in Temple Street.

"They are performing kidney transplants here in Ireland. At that time they weren't and, also, people weren't donating. Doctors weren't approaching parents in the awful case of a child dying in an accident. They [bereaved families] had no awareness that they could get some peace out of that situation by donating. It simply wasn't brought up."

In 1986, James' parents were in a panic because James had been brought in for a dialysis in Temple Street and, says Caroline, "it didn't work for him. He was basically looking at his days running out if he didn't get a transplant."

Tina Morahan "who is a very shy person in terms of being the centre of attention", drove to RTE in Montrose with James and Caroline's granny May Dunne and told the woman behind the reception desk that she had to speak to the researchers on Gay Byrne's show. When a researcher appeared, Mrs Morahan -- with James in her arms -- said "this is my son; and going on television or radio to make a plea for an organ donor is his only chance". Or words to that effect. Either way, they had the desired effect because the next day Tina was on Gaybo's radio show.

Two weeks later she found herself on The Late Late Show itself, appealing again for a donor for James.

"Going on The Late Late Show was a terrifying thing for her to do but she did it," Caroline recalls. "She said, 'People in Ireland are not donating'. The response was huge. It got people thinking and acting. People started carrying donor cards, which wouldn't have even occurred to them before."

At that time, the operation couldn't happen in Ireland, however. When a suitable donor came through finally, the Morahan family immediately moved to England. Caroline, then nine, and her big sister Olivia stayed with their cousins, the Dunnes, in Chobham in Surrey.

She was taken out of St Bridgets in Glasnevin and put in St Hugh's, a mixed school in Surrey.

"That was very difficult for me," she remembers. "England is just across the water. It might as well be Siberia in terms of culture.

"Everything was different. I found it very confusing to be suddenly in a class with boys. I didn't know what to be doing or saying. I found it completely intimidating."

While Caroline and Olivia were living in Surrey, their mother was in situ at Guys hospital in south-east London, where James finally had his transplant operation when he was four.

Tina was staying in a flat adjacent to the hospital. Caroline's father, who worked for the Examiner newspaper, was travelling back and forth between Dublin and England. She can't remember exactly how long she was in Surrey other than the fact that she can recall her school uniform changing from a winter one to a summer one. "Still, despite the childhood with a very sick brother," she says, "we had, as much as was humanly possible, a normal existence."

Her mother would bring Olivia and Caroline to music lessons, Brigíns, gymnastics and speech drama. And their parents would ensure that James was involved in everything. James would be roughing it in the garden with his sisters. There was, she says, no cottonwool situation. He was very, very funny, Caroline laughs. And he got away with things that children his age wouldn't. Anything that made the poor, sick angel happy was fine as far as his family were concerned.

Caroline recalls how their Uncle Jimmy, who lived in London, smoked his own rolled-up cigarettes and he would always give James one. Caroline remembers how on one occasion five-year-old James was sitting in London Zoo with his uncle -- both of them with cigarettes in their mouths. A little old lady going past was heard to harrumph loudly: "It's a disgrace." (The real disgrace was, of course, that there were no hospitals in Ireland in the mid-Eighties that did organ transplant operations.)

Tragically, James didn't grow: he had to take a lot of different medicines constantly and he couldn't really eat. James never complained. He was too busy thinking of, and plotting, where he was going to have his next fun adventure after he took his medicines. "He was great fun," says Caroline.

This remarkably happy child was never without his He-Man sword -- with which he playfully struck Gay Byrne on The Late Late Show in 1986 after the transplant operation at Guys Hospital.

"He had a magnetic personality. He'd make you laugh. You'd find him flirting with women passing by on the street. They would think he was so cute and adorable. We would play for hours and James had an incredible imagination," his sister remembers.

"He was just a really sweet little guy," Caroline says. "He was lethal as well. If he was alive now, I would never encourage any of my friends to go out with him," she laughs. How James would have felt about Caroline's own boyfriends over the years is a moot point. (James's big sis can remember her first kiss when she was 10 in Gaeltacht -- "his mouth tasted of ketchup!" she roars.)

When Caroline, Olivia and her cousins put on plays in the house for their parents, James would join in and come up with hilarious improvised lines out of the blue. Another day when a play Caroline put on at the house required her being slapped theatrically in the face by her cousin Susie, James started crying and shouted, "Leave my sister alone!"

"He was very protective and very very cute." There was much more to James Morahan than that, of course. "He touched a lot of people and a lot of people will always remember him." Recently, one of Olivia Morahan's children was sick in Temple Street Hospital. One day when Caroline and her mother were visiting, a nurse came up and said that she had a picture of James at home.

Caroline still talks to him in her dreams. "I used to be able to go to bed and ask for him to come along in a dream. He would be just there, doing things, normal things. There would be no two-way conversation." Now he just comes along when he wants to. Caroline says she clearly doesn't have the ability that she used to have with summoning James.

The squirrel is getting brave now, running closer towards us, as if the spirit of James is in the Botanic Gardens with us, and urging him to play like he used to do. With her scarf pulled up around her neck against the spring cold, the television star is more than willing to engage emotionally with a painful part of her past.

I felt a sense of unease -- inappropriateness, possibly -- that there might be something a touch voyeuristic about examining someone's -- a family's -- pain in such microsopic detail. Caroline says talking about James is an opportunity to get an important message across.

"I would hope that soon in Ireland we would have an Opt Out situation whereby in the event that someone was to tragically die in an accident or be taken suddenly, organ donation should happen automatically unless someone has a specific reason; in which case they opt out," she explains. "It really should be automatic because when tragedy strikes, a family is left in a state of shock, they may not be equipped to deal with anything beyond that loss. Someone with renal failure or a cystic fibrosis sufferer in need of a heart and lung transplant isn't going to come to mind, it's difficult for a doctor to broach the subject of donation in such circumstances and so hundreds of people on waiting lists are forgotten."

When James finally succumbed to his fate -- "which we knew was coming for a long time" -- his parents donated his eyes to a teenage girl who was in the same sort of urgent need that James once was. "We know that a girl at that time can now see who would absolutely not be able to see if it weren't for James. So having witnessed both sides as a family we can see what it means to be on the receiving end of a gift like that; and also to be the giver".

In the face of such tragedy at least you would have the solace of knowing that some other family had been given a chance and had been given a life. Caroline confirms, "And that's what it is: you are giving someone the gift of life. You are freeing them from a machine and you are freeing them from facing a wall."

The success rate is, she says, 90 per cent now. "The current state of play is that 600 people are waiting. If you look at the statistics of accidental death, that sounds senseless; instead people can make sense of it in this way. From Mom and Dad's point of view, the deep sense of peace they feel is because that young girl can now see."

Fatefully James had to die first before that girl could have the gift of sight.

On October 8, 1988, James died at home with his mum and dad and two sisters in Glasnevin. Having been through so much -- much, much more than any child should have to go through -- James' system was annihilated. Understandably, Caroline doesn't want to elaborate too much on his passing. She is thinking of people who are now awaiting a transplant or have had a transplant. She doesn't, she says, want to put any worries on their minds.

"His transplant worked for a while and then it started to fail," Caroline says, haltingly. James had no fight left in him to go through another transplant. "He was just too weak."

When the beautiful star of Off The Rails thinks of her late brother now, the immediate thought is, she says, his smile.

"He was always smiling."

That positivity (set against horrible pain) has been passed on to his big sister. "I think that because of having James as a brother it taught me a lot of the lessons in life that you would only learn through vast experience and sometimes a lot of people don't ever cop on to," she says.

With James, she explains, the Morahan family were all forced automatically to live in the present all the time because they didn't know how much time they had left with him. In hindsight, Caroline says she wasn't really overtly aware of that.

"But Mom and Dad prepared Olivia and I when the end was coming," she adds. "And they did that in the proper way. They were honest with us. We all dealt with it together. I don't know where they got the ability to communicate it in the best way for us. It was very much a day-to-day process -- and most of those days were good. And for the most part I had a normal childhood."

What she gained from the experience of those dark times was, she says, "an absolute and full appreciation of what life is and how lucky I am. And about living in the present and not worrying about nonsensical things that don't really have any bigger bearing on the bigger picture."

She says she doesn't get a lump in her throat thinking about James -- other than when she walks into the wards in children's hospitals at Christmas time because she knows what they're going through. "You never wish to have a sick child in the family, but if it does happen you do get the ability, as I saw from my own parents, to deal with it. I think my sister and I are more rounded people and more sensitive as a result," she says.

"So that's why I don't get upset when people make nasty comments or whatever about me. Because I think: 'What's that got to do with anything? Nothing.' It has kind of given me a very solid rooting in what's real."

That lack of what's real would certainly apply to media criticisms of her for using a phrase like Brand Morahan about herself and allegedly comparing herself physically to Angelina Jolie: "I'm glad you've brought that up," she says. "I don't talk about myself as a brand. And I don't think I'm Angelina Jolie. That's laughable."

She says she doesn't get much bitchiness in the media apart from, "the odd stab here and there. That Angelina Jolie thing is ridiculous. Someone said to me I was the image of her. It was total trap-setting." She explains that her reply was "not really". There were some scenes in Tomb Raider -- where Brad Pitt's wife was basically looking her absolute "roughest" -- where Caroline thought there was a resemblance. "But I never said I think I'm a ringer for Angelina Jolie," she says. "That's someone else's invention.

"How I survive all that is that I just don't attach to it at all or think about it," she continues. "If you were to start thinking about what people say or what they think you probably wouldn't leave the house."

Perhaps another indication of Caroline Morahan's rooting in what's real is that she says she has absolutely no bitterness towards RTE for appearing to leave her hanging with her show Off The Rails frozen in limbo without good explanation. "God, no. I have no bitterness. God, getting the job on Off The Rails was absolutely, 100 per cent a dream for me. All I feel is complete gratitude."

Is the show axed?

"They actually don't know. I haven't been in touch with our commissioning editor; just because I have been waiting for them to decide. I always thought Off The Rails was going to end last year so I have been doing lots of other things and working away on projects myself under the radar. I can't really talk about them; mostly because I don't like talking about things until they are at the finished stage."

It is demonstrably unfair: Caroline Morahan is hugely popular across the nation. And yet her career on television appears up in the air. "That is the nature of being a freelance television presenter," she says calmly. " Even last year when I thought Off The Rails was going to come to an end, I had meetings with the head of television in RTE and the next-in-command and lots of different commissioning editors to talk about ideas that I had, and I asked, 'If Off The Rails ends where do I stand with RTE?' They said: 'Caroline, we are thrilled with your work and we want you to be presenting programmes with us.' Look, when I signed up for Off The Rails, I knew there was never going to be any real security with it."

Does the insecurity of the television career effect you psychologically?

"I don't feel any insecurity, because there is lots of stuff going on. I'm not sitting at home waiting for the phone to ring."

Caroline will be revising the role of Surfia (the character loosely based on Gillian Quinn, whom she played in I, Keano) in the new run of the Roy Keane-satirising play from May 17-31 at the Olympia Theatre, with Gary Cooke as Dunphia and Jamie Beamish as the man himself.

"I am really enjoying it," she smiles, her mind obviously distracted by the memory of the boy-wonder who gave her the sense of what's real 20 years ago.

"I have never spoken about James in any interview before because it is so intensely private," she says. "He's part of me and my family but the way that you broached this at this time, we all felt that we could do some good by speaking about it now. I speak about him all the time. All my friends know. There would be no 'oh my God, I never knew' sensation. He is too important to be just a paragraph in an article about something else," she says.

"The ideal thing would be for it to be law: automatic; that donation just happens because it is a perfectly natural and wonderful way for something good to happen in the face of an awful tragedy. I can't stress enough how much peace it can give a family."

She continues that her mother recently met a woman who was a donor recipient. The woman told Tina Morahan that she had a sense of guilt around it until she spoke to her.

"Because," says Caroline, "my mom was able to say how much joy it gave them to know that losing James gave someone the gift of sight. These are things none of us want to think about. Some people say they want their child to go into the grave as he or she was. But after a car crash he or she is not the same. But if it was automatic, we wouldn't have to think about it. Until that time I'd urge everyone to carry an organ donor card."

Somewhere up there, James is carrying on.

Organ Donor Awareness Week ended the day after this interview was done, April 6. To get an organ donor card call the Irish Kidney Association on 01 6205306 or visit www.ika.ie To see 'I, Keano' call the Olympia box office (0818 719 330/ 01 679 3323) or visit Ticketmaster online at www.ticketmaster.ie/ www.mcd.ie

- Barry Egan